Less educated people held the key to Brexit

Pollsters underestimated the strength of the Leave vote in the EU referendum because they failed to pick up the extent to which the less educated were prepared to back Brexit, a polling expert has said.

Professor John Curtice – whose exit poll in the 2015 general election was the first to indicate an overall Conservative victory – said the way people voted in the referendum was different to the way they vote in general elections.

“There was a very substantial difference by education in people’s willingness to vote Leave or Remain,” he told a briefing organised by NatCen Social Research.

“This was a referendum which was essentially between the social liberals and the social conservatives in our society, which is rather different division from the one the opinion polls are usually trying to estimate, which is between left and right.

“That is a division which is centred much more around class than around education.”

Prof Curtice said there appeared to have been a tendency among media commentators to discount polls pointing to the strength of the Leave vote because many of them supported Remain.

“It is fair to say that the majority of people who were reporting and commenting on the campaign were probably in favour of Remain rather than Leave, and there was therefore a clear tendency for people to say, ‘Those internet polls, they must be dodgy, they must be wrong. The phone polls must be right. It is obvious that Remain are going to win’,” he said.